1. The Field of the Invention
This invention relates to sporting goods, and, more particularly, to novel systems and methods for golf practice green construction and use.
2. The Background Art
Golf has enjoyed popularity over centuries. New players, at an increasing rate, devote leisure time to improving skills in the game at an increasing rate. Although the game of skill at directing a ball is simple in principle, numerous factors affect one""stability to repeatably strike a ball correctly. A major portion of golf is the putt. One third to one half the strokes representing a player""s score may often be putting strokes.
Accordingly, a never-ending desire to improve the game, and an eternal belief that one can improve, motivate individuals to practice. The expense and availability, as well as the inconvenience, of practicing on actual courses limit practice. Improved driving requires space. Improved putting requires not space but true conditions reflecting actual putts. Numerous devices exist to facilitate a user putting a ball in an artificial environment. However, prior art systems failed to produce the effective practice due to the inaccurate conditions of replication of actual golf putting.
One difficulty of golfers is obtaining a natural lie in an artificial environment. Putting practice in a back yard of a home does not provide natural conditions of a green. A green is typically provided with sand as the uppermost soil layer, with a specific type and density of grass at a specific height to provide the desired stimp. The actual variations might be something less than infinite, but a large number, as a practical matter. Contours may vary in a longitudinal direction between a golfer and a cup, and in a lateral direction side-to-side across the travel path of the ball.
Indoor systems or portable systems may rely on conventional carpets of a room, or specialized carpets for taking the place of a green surface. Both suffer, albeit unequally, from the inability to provide the compression, the fiber resistance, the stiffness of the fibers, the length of fibers, and other conditions of the natural green.
Simple systems that enjoy light weight provide crude replication of putting conditions. More complex systems are not portable, not readily adjustable or both. Slopes in a longitudinal direction and, at the same time, in lateral a direction that represent the true conditions of a golfing green are important, even necessary, and unavailable.
Typical systems provide a raised area around the cup for returning a ball that misses the cup. Such a geometry is very unlike an actual green. Various attempts to gradually change contours surrounding a cup provide complex, cumbersome, heavy, expensive, and still inadequate structures. Certain attempts have positioned frames above and beside a green. Such visual obstacles are very unlike a green, and provide several disadvantages and irregularities. For example, an actual green provides only certain unique sensations of space, angle, and the like. Artificial structures provide references for determining distances and positions. Moreover, visual obstructions distract.
Carpets placed on a floor typically provide both inadequate compression, fiber activity, and contours, while unable to provide any downhill lie toward the cup, and, typically, any repeatability in contouring mechanisms. Systems relying on more framing than structure beneath a carpet are typically either too rigid or too soft, the first being too heavy, and the second being mechanically inadequate for representing the actual performance for a golf green.
Golfers are forever hopeful of improving their game. To this extent, commercial putting greens, miniature golf, and driving ranges proliferate. However, most putting green practice areas do not represent greens on actual golf courses. Using leveling and xe2x80x9cunlevelingxe2x80x9d equipment, greens constructors grade the surface of a green to provide hills and hollows along the surface of the green moving from the perimeter thereof toward the cup.
As a result, the contours encountered by a ball traveling in a more-or-less direct line along the green toward a cup are anything but a direct line. A ball may be rolled to one side, another, or both on its path toward the cup. However, conventional artificial golfing greens, office carpets, and the like do not provide an ability to replicate the lateral contours or vertical variations along longitudinal lateral lines orthogonal to the putting direction between a putting club and the golf cup on a golfing green.
What is needed is a structure and method replicating true contours, feel, appearance, action, lie, and positioning in a lightweight, portable economical artificial putting system.
In view of the foregoing, it is a primary object of the present invention to provide a practice green that provides adjustable contours, including multiple adjustable contours, that may be changed in vertical elevation, provide different vertical elevations at opposing ends of a laterally placed line across the practice green, and provide multiple instances of variable contour lines laterally extending lines) along a longitudinal trajectory between a golf ball and the cup of a putting green.
Consistent with the foregoing objects, and in accordance with the invention as embodied and broadly described herein, an apparatus and method are disclosed, in suitable detail to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention. In certain embodiments an apparatus and method in accordance with the present invention may include a mat having a xe2x80x9cgreenxe2x80x9d layer on top and a structural member or tension layer below, separated by an intermediate web or spacing pad. Stringers (flexible longitudinal rods) may provide continuity or smoothing of the longitudinal variations in height along the green. Cross members may provide elevation changes along the longitudinal direction or access a lateral direction of the green.
Feet on each of the cross members may be independently adjustable to provide a xe2x80x9ccantxe2x80x9d from one side to the other, or vice versa, at any contour along the longitudinal direction. A pedestal or deck may be provided for a user. The user may adjust the height of the deck arbitrarily in order to be below, above, or level with the cup. Intermediate the deck and the cup, the contours may be adjusted individually, and on each side to create breaks right or left, rising or descending slopes to the cup, and multiple combinations thereof.